The Cult of Tara

WORSHIP
one of his servants who is naturally very credulous; while the gentleman
is asleep, hand the servant some harmless concoction and tell
him that it will cure his master within a certain space of time. The
spirits of the servant, made receptive by his complete faith in your
medical powers, will be powerfully stamped with the image of this
future cure; they will flow out and similarly stamp the spirits of his
master, also in a state of receptivity because he is asleep. Thus the
cure will be effected." This shows clearly, Walker concludes, that
Bacon still believed in at least this ingredient of Ficinian magic, the
traditional doctrine of the magical power of the imagination fortified
by credulity. 141
The point to be noted in all these arguments is the materialist
presuppositions of the authors; whether they accept or reject the
effectiveness of magic, they do not spiritualize the universe so much
as render the spirit corporeal. The yogin shares with the Renaissance
magus a self-conscious and literate tradition, a sense of system
in metaphysics, and a belief in magic, but where the magus breaks
the boundary between image and object by hypostatizing the image,
the yogin breaks the boundary by dereifying the object, systemically
emptying every description of its reference to a real entity. Nagarjuna
applies this process of metaphysical "emptying" to every
concept of "real existence"—and hence to every concept of "real
nonexistence" wherever it is found; space, time, motion, causality,
persons, and events can have existence neither predicated of them
nor denied them. Thus public reality—the arising, abiding, and
perishing of events—neither exists nor nonexists: it is "like an
illusion, a dream, a fairy city in the sky." 142
Vasubandhu, building
upon and in many ways systematizing this tradition, says that the
"awareness" of this public reality is the "construction of a nonreality":
it neither exists in the way it seems, since it is only an
appearance where it seems a fact, nor does it nonexist, "since it
occurs at least as a phantasy." But then, continues Vasubandhu,
why not say that this nonreality simply does not exist? Because
beings are bound by it; if it were not real then "there could be
neither bondage nor liberation, and we would fall into the error of
denying both defilement and purity." 143
Thus public reality and the divine image, a magical illusion and
a
dream, have no real existence, but they all occur and have real
effects, and hence have no real nonexistence. The Tibetan yogin
takes this ontology as his axiom: the public object and thecontem-
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